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Bittman: Regulate sugar

“Let me state the obvious: there is no nutritional need for foods with added sugar.”

New York Times anti-food columnist Mark Bittman writes:

… Added sugar is not the only dangerous food. But unlike animal products, for example, which we also overconsume, it has no benefits. Yet we down it at the rate of 150 pounds per person per year, and while scientists argue whether it is addictive in humans (it meets the criteria for addiction in animals), it is most certainly habit-forming. Lustig and his co-authors suggest that actions like imposingtaxes on added sugar or establishing a minimum age for purchase of sodas (they mention 17 in their paper) would reduce consumption.

The question “Is this necessary?” is unavoidable. But as obesityand its consequences ravage our health care system, we struggle not only with our own diets but also with preventing our children from falling into the same traps. Last year a brigade of parents stood watch outside a corner store in North Philadelphia in an attempt to prevent their kids from buying junk food.

They’ve been called foot soldiers, but you might call them vigilantes. Vigilantism occurs when people believe the government isn’t doing its job. We need the government on our side. It must acknowledge the dangers caused by the most unhealthy aspects of our diet and figure out how to help us cope with them, because this is the biggest public health challenge facing the developed world.

5 thoughts on “Bittman: Regulate sugar”

Right, and what we eat becomes “THEIR” business because of possible harm to “the health system.” SCREW the “health system”!!!!!!!
If the Constitution means anything at all, then my individual liberty trumps your concern over “the health system.”
Government health care = death of freedom.

As the government declares certain foods “dangerous, “unnecessary,”
“has no benefits, etc., we move toward a government issued ration.

“In 2022, the population has grown to forty million people in New York City alone.
. . . .
Food is scarce; most of the population survives on rations produced by the Soylent Corporation, whose newest product is Soylent Green, a small green wafer advertised to contain “high-energy plankton.”

Bittman’s claim against fructose ignores that the American Medical Association and American Dietetic Association both claim that your body cannot tell the differance between fructose sugar and sucrose sugar which by the way, share some of the same molecules. Yet another example of choosing the “junk science” that keeps too many journalists employed.

Yes, sugars – whether naturally occurring or applied as additives – are of course necessary. No, sugars in the human diet are not dangerous; no causal relationships been demonstrated between sugar consumption and any health risk save for dental caries.